Karl Reichl's recent book The Oral Epic: From Performance to Interpretation (2021), by its title underlines the oral and performing aspect of epics and clearly signals the focus of the study: the epic as performed art. Only the singers of the long heroic tales can supply true information about such features. Our knowledge of the epics handed down in written form will inevitably lack the paratextual evidence that only the oral event supplies. The approach of this study will enrich our understanding not only of epics in oral transmission, but also of the classical and medieval epics that have long since lost their milieux as entertainment for a listening public but have an afterlife as world literature in print.
Reichl's study represents a lifelong occupation with both the oral and the written epic in Europe and Asia. One of the most esteemed and productive scholars in this field, he has an impressive list of scientific books and articles to his credit, as well as a full translation from his personal recording of a famous singer J. Bazarov (1927–2006) of the Karakalpac epic Edige (recorded 1993, published 2007). This work is among the famous heroic narratives in the big family of Turkic languages, the specialty of the author. A learned and inspiring scholar in epic studies, Reichl is totally devoted to and enthusiastic about the art and its creative artists. From his first meeting with an Uzbek singer in 1981 he notes: “here poetry became song, the narrating voice of the tale became the voice of the singer, the poetic tale in the mind acquired a new existence: as a tale heard and a poetry sung, absorbed with one's eyes and ears, in the bodily presence of the teller and singer of tales and his listeners”. Writing this book in his mature years, rather than looking at the bleak side of things, he evokes the stubborn and persistent nature of this art in its home cultures, “still alive at the beginning of the twenty-first century”. The book also ends on an optimistic note: “The time for dirges has happily not yet arrived”.
The activity of preserving the singers’ performances for research purpose as experienced personally by the author also tells another tale: singers of epic are since the late twentieth century few and far between. A natural milieu and audience for the epic performance is rare – on the brink of extinction (the performance setting is divided into “natural”, “artificial”, and “induced natural”). The presence of the ethnographer will in any case change the setting from natural to induced natural, if not to artificial. What the researcher has a chance to experience is the art of a few remaining executants that must be hunted out in out-of-the-way places, performing all alone for the investigator's recording equipment, devoid of the traditional public (sometimes family and local officials serve as audience). The bell is tolling – it is the eleventh hour – or is it? If we go back in time, we observe how epic traditions were uncovered in large numbers in many places all over the world since the 1950s, but how much impact did they have at the time? Already in the infancy of this research field, the orality of the art seemed evanescent. What remains and will remain are the textual versions collected and edited by researchers, local enthusiasts, or government functionaries. The oral epic is dying – the written epic could never take its place, since the medium of print and paper is completely different, and the audience has become a readership, mainly a readership of scholars.
Despite – and not least because of – these circumstances, Reichl in the 1980s moved boldly into the territory of oral performance. In this book he offers a systematic and deep-ploughing treatment of the features of the epic in oral setting. He uncovers step by step the layers of oral performance relevant to the epic genre: definition and classification of the genre; the epic singer as transmitter; creativity and innovation; communication and textualization; the voice of the singer (speaking and singing); the gesture of the performer; song as a vehicle (music and meter); the instruments of performance; the interpretation of the complex of words and music; the singer and the tale; performance and interpretation. This study is particularly painstaking in describing the variations of performance as expressed in each subgenre and with each individual performer. Singing, musical accompaniment, instruments, are given much attention along with the words of the performance. The exact classification and description of these aspects are worked out in the spirit of a botanist. This book is a treasure trove of observations, providing keys to deeper understanding of the art.
Reichl occasionally reaches out to epic traditions in Persian, Arabic, Indian and African languages, but it is probably no coincidence that he is silent about epic traditions among the majority Chinese population, the Han Chinese. For much of the twentieth century, there was a scholarly consensus about the lack of epics in Han-Chinese culture. Among the minority people of China living in the borderlands, oral epics have had a long history. As for the Han majority, the genre was not recognized as relevant. Under the umbrella term “singing and telling arts”, shuochang yishu, China had developed a fine-meshed system comprising in the 1980s about 120 genres, defined and named in Chinese according to age-old traditions. The term “epic” was not indigenous in Han culture and there was no slot for this art in the system. Those of the minority peoples were labelled according to Chinese genres as well, but in the annotation some of them were given the status of “historical poems in oral performance”, shuochang shi shi, or “long narrative poems”, changpian xushi shi, a kind of definition-in-translation of the Western term “epic”. What the Han-Chinese people had in terms of long, heroic, oral performance art was their more than a thousand years old “storytelling”, shuoshu, that is still alive today. This art was mainly in prose with occasional poems to be declaimed, but apart from being told, not sung, the circumstances of learning, transmitting, and performing orally were close to the situation of epics, as described in Reichl's book.
Anne McLaren, one of the most experienced and prolific scholars of Chinese popular culture from the late imperial to the contemporary period, with her book Memory Making in Folk Epics of China: The Intimate and the Local in Chinese Regional Culture (2022) clearly breaks with the earlier doctrine of the missing epics of Han culture. She offers an excellent study of the lengthy romantic/heroic songs from the Lower Yangzi delta that may claim to meet the requirements of the epic while belonging to the Han-Chinese culture. Rice-cultivating peasants of the Wu-dialect area around Lake Tai in Jiangsu Province had an age-old tradition of both short and longish work songs, originally called “mountain songs”, shan'ge. These ballads about the origin of rice cultivation, rebel heroes, and forbidden love affairs were originally performed during the long hours of heavy work in the fields. The singers’ voice must be strong and capable of sustained effort since they had to sing out-of-doors for hours at a time. The audience was local fellow peasants, dispersed over the paddy fields. Singers and listeners all shared the daily home-language of the Northern Wu dialect, one of the major South Chinese dialects, very different from the dominant Mandarin dialects of the North. The singing was meant to give impetus to the working rhythm, much like the Western tradition of sea shanties. A major part of the songs reflected the various stages of implantation, weeding, and harvesting that were described in figurative terms hinting at human procreation. Mythic heroes, local ancestors of rice growing, belonged to the tradition, while sexual overtones of implantation and fruit-bearing were echoed in the love stories containing risqué passages of sexual encounters among youngsters boating along rivers and lakesides.
McLaren was already an established scholar of the oral and oral-related traditions of the Lower Yangzi (wedding songs, women's laments, etc.) when she embarked on her recent project, accomplishing the first English-language book about epics in the Han-Chinese domain. When, in 2004, she arrived in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, she was introduced to a few remaining singers. The activity of singing while labouring in rice fields had ceased during the childhood of these singers. They were not part of the original milieu of outdoor singing but had learned from their elders and were enthusiasts for singing shan'ge under new conditions. It was, however, not possible to listen to or record live performances anymore, even if there was occasional singing of short samples to celebrate the arrival of the foreign researcher. For more than thirty years, however, local scholars and aficionados had collected mountain songs, combining them into cycles of prestigious length – much in the vein of the Finnish Kalevala epics collected and creatively supplemented by the folklore enthusiast Elias Lönnrot (1802–84).
A fundamental difference was, however, that the main informant of McLaren's project, Zhu Hairong (b. 1930), was not at the outset an academic, but an “insider” – a peasant singer, who acquired literacy and was able to sing, record, and transcribe his own and others’ songs. As the author notes: “[he] composed something that is neither a transcript of a folk song-cycle nor a folklorist-produced representation … but something that transcends both. He could be best understood as a composer-recorder who retains fidelity to the aesthetic resources of his region … a new type of Yangzi Delta folk genre, that is worthy of investigation in its own right.” Qian Afu (1907–93), a star singer since the 1950s, deeply immersed in the local culture as a performer and transmitter, and the female peasant singer Lu Amei (1902–86), had both been recorded and published under similar conditions. Mountain song collections were “re-created” for local folklorists, who were keener on obtaining well-adapted texts than preserving the tradition in “raw”, unmediated form. The dialectal phraseology and the contents of these hybrid versions were usually heavily rewritten and “cleaned” according to political and moral norms of the period.
With analytical expertise and characteristic frankness, McLaren has sifted and gleaned from the archives of the Wu folk epics, giving a many-faceted treatment of the state of the art in written transmission. She has truly opened the door wide into the spiritual and material culture distinctive of the Lower Yangzi region.
